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A new Xenoblade game is upon us and though the number two is in the game's title it's not a direct sequel. We've got new worlds to explore and all new characters.

You are Rex, the Aegis (whatever that means), and your companion is Pyra, who is a Blade. Your task is to get Pyra to Elysium, the mythical paradise. Along the way you'll gather companions and collect more Blades, who you can use in combat.

Some things have changed, but a lot has stayed the same. The UI and how you select arts has completely changed, likely for the better as it appears to be refined. I wanted to say simplified, but I don't know if that's true. Positioning is still important, as are status effects and stagger/topple is still important.

In the game there will be multiple Titans to explore. Civilizations have sprung up on the backs of certain Titans, with different biomes to each Titan. Some Titans are smaller and act as airships. How many and how varied they all are is to be seen.

The game is slated to be released simultaneously in all regions December 1st, 2017.

Note: There will only be English voices, no Japanese track. Nintendo changed course here and dual audio will be available at launch as free DLC.

Also, Nintendo of Europe is the lead for localization outside of Japan, just like with the original XC.

Felt like the other drivers were reasonably good at smashing, compared to topple and launch. I had one smasher other than Roc and quite often I did not have time to switch before they used it (which was a bit annoying, please let the enemy hang for a second...)

My normal party composition is a bit more varied, but for smash farming here's what I did:

Nia with Drommarch plus two bitball users for all breaking, all the time.

Rex using Mythra for topple. For launching, an axe user works, but I generally preferred to use

(mechanical spoiler for the end of chapter 7)

Spoiler:

Pandoria. Once Rex can equip any blade, if you move a story-locked blade out of their driver's first slot, Rex can then equip them. This also has the additional effect of freeing up that driver's third slot, if you want to use a different weapon set, as I'll mention with regard to Morag below.

You could have Rex equip anything for a third blade, but for maximum smashing efficiency I preferred to get as many breaks happening as fast as possible, so I used a spear. Additionally, I equipped him with an Overcharge Bangle, which greatly improves your chances of making all the blade switches you need in a timely manner.

Finally, while Tora is okay about smashing, I greatly prefer using the fourth driver anyway, which is great because they can equip three katanas and become a smashing machine.

Spirit Crucible Elpys. Ugh... Perhaps the challenge was meant to be finding your way around? It is called a crucible, I guess. If any area highlighted the limitations of the map, however...

Part of it WAS my own fault, though. There was a section where I kept trying to run in and brute force a bunch of enemies and kept dying. Once I slowed down and "pulled" one at a time out of the pack, I made it through fine. They do give you the ability to do that, but I hadn't really had to up to this point.

In the Great Hall, I experimented with falling to my death until I found a sequence I could survive to make it to the exit platform... to reach the Stele of Judgment... which eventually sent me to Google to find out that Aegaeon can get Ancient Wisdom if I go harvest some insects. So, I left the area to do that and came back. Odd roadblock, that.

I put the Switch to sleep in the middle of the fight with the Phantasms. I know I need to get them down before they spawn more but I haven't managed it yet.

You forgot the "dominate the boss completely only to watch your character struggle in the ensuing cutscene like your domination never happened". Makes the pre-cutscene fights feel meaningless.

Yeah. Quite silly.

Really hate when companions are taken away as well. Better not to give me real access to them before they are ready to let me use them for good. So I dont end up building my whole set up around a character I am going to lose for the next 5 hours...
Could just have them passively following me around, if the character needs to be there for story reason

One of my biggest pet peeves in JRPGs is when party members get yanked out for story reasons, especially when the game is large and non-linear. It makes me cranky and honestly a bit resentful.

One of my other pet peeves in JRPGs is when you fight the same story bosses over and over again but never actually defeat them. I find it exhausting and tedious.

This game keeps doing both of those, and I am tired of it.

Yes, this game abuses those cliches to kingdom come. There's even a dude with long grey hair, who was designed by Tetsuya Nomura, who, IIRC, says something along the lines of "this isn't even my true form."

Don't even get me started on Nomura's terrible character designs for Torna. They don't look like any of the other characters in the game. They have these weird, plasticy, inexpressive faces, which leads to them being expressive almost entirely through broad gestures and character tics. And they're annoyingly anachronistic, most especially Akhos with that stupid schoolboy collar and glasses, but also Malos with the same goddamn haircut and face as one of the boys in Final Fantasy XV. It's the laziest, most phoned-in set of designs I've ever seen from Nomura, which is saying something considering how often his designs look like Xerox collages of each other.

You forgot the "dominate the boss completely only to watch your character struggle in the ensuing cutscene like your domination never happened". Makes the pre-cutscene fights feel meaningless.

My interpretation of this has always been that exhausting enemy HP doesn't always = kill. Then again, my first JRPG was Final Fantasy IV which is the poster child for a lot of these mechanical tropes. I think playing predominantly Square-Enix and Nintendo JRPGs has made me numb to some of these issues.

The Spirit Crucible, which I mostly dealt with by just running past everything. I didn't fight anything until the Phantoms, which was a great story moment but not my favorite battle. I couldn't tell if I was doing something wrong, not killing things fast enough, or if it was just designed as a long fight with a lot of adds, but it felt like it took forever.

Thankfully, I didn't have any trouble with the Stele. I was able to get past it with just Brighid and Dromarch, no insect grinding required.

You forgot the "dominate the boss completely only to watch your character struggle in the ensuing cutscene like your domination never happened". Makes the pre-cutscene fights feel meaningless.

My interpretation of this has always been that exhausting enemy HP doesn't always = kill. Then again, my first JRPG was Final Fantasy IV which is the poster child for a lot of these mechanical tropes. I think playing predominantly Square-Enix and Nintendo JRPGs has made me numb to some of these issues.

Final Fantasy VII was the first JRPG I played, and it's because of that game that I hate having party members yanked away so much. Aeris died, Cloud lost his mind, and I got screwed badly as a result. I hadn't known to properly rotate through my characters for even leveling, so I had one capable character and a party made of wet paper. I ended up grinding and struggling for hours to make up for it, and it nearly made me give up on the whole thing.

In XC2's defense, at least they leave the player with a full strength party. In fact, I was often forced to rotate in someone who was stronger than the person I lost. Still not OK, but it's better than the FFVII scenario.

I'm not enjoying Xenoblade Chronicles 2 very much and have put it to the side as it was too much of a time sink with too little payout. I'd rather go back to playing/finishing XCX because I'm not enjoying how long combat takes and I still haven't managed to come to terms with the "stand still to auto attack".

It doesn't help that the game came in really hot and feels rushed.

NSMike wrote:

How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.

Interesting. What makes you say that? I haven't gotten that impression at all.

The crashes. I've had three.

The technical performance is okay at best. It looks good with the lighting effects, but I miss the incredible draw distance of XCX. Here I'm staring at a far draw distance but at sub-400p and it bothers me.

The UI adjustments they've been making in the patches, especially the map. Clearly they didn't have enough time to refine their UI. Of course, slightly obtuse UI is par for the course for them.

I guess I should say it came in really hot for a Monolith game. Obviously it's not a flaming mess, but where I felt like Monolith was staffed with tech wizards I feel like it's pretty clear that most of their staff was working on BotW while a smaller, more budget constrained staff was working on this. Which is basically how things turned out. (I can cite that last bit about the staff if I can dig up the interview where Takahashi or someone said that for most of the development there were only 40 people working on XC2.)

NSMike wrote:

How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.